


quiet

by heartshapedcookie



Category: Be More Chill - Iconis/Tracz
Genre: Michael mell loves his best friend so goddamn much, it's not quite boyfs but. You Know, partially deaf jeremy, they're best friends!! they care so much about each other!!, this is the shortest thing ive ever written and it feels so Wrong
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-09
Updated: 2017-12-09
Packaged: 2019-02-12 10:20:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 993
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12957162
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/heartshapedcookie/pseuds/heartshapedcookie
Summary: The aches of being partially deaf and wondering if your best friend thinks about you in a certain way.





	quiet

It begins with a voltaic tingle deep in the labyrinthine swirl of canal, bone, and damaged nerve tissue. He should know exactly what part of him is hurting considering the impressive amount of time he’s spent in audiologist offices and, subsequently, the time he’s spent staring blankly at anatomical models of the ear, but he never got around to learning exact terminology—eardrum, he knows that one, and the snail shell is the cochlea, he thinks—and doesn’t really care much to educate himself now. All that matters is the ominous tingle, which pulls him out of his conversation with Michael for a brief moment and encourages his hand to rub aimlessly at the skin surrounding his ear.

“Hey.” Michael, gently poking his face. The face poke—an unswervingly effective method of getting Jeremy out of his own head—alerts him to the fact that he’s been staring at the wall behind Michael for the better part of two minutes now, completely disconnected. “You good?”

“Huh?” A second passes before he can process the question. “Oh. Yeah. I’m good.”

“You’re rubbing your ear.”

“I’m… Yeah?” It’s the most intelligent response he can offer at the moment. The tingle has already started taking on a spiky, jagged quality that he recognizes as a precursor to the debilitating earaches that occasionally show up to ruin his life. Of course he has to get slapped with one now, when he finally gets to hang out with Michael after a busy, hectic week of barely seeing his best friend. 

Michael’s eyes soften and he leans forward slightly as if able to divine the truth just by looking closely at Jeremy. It should offend him that he’s transparent enough to be looked through like window glass, but he can’t bring himself to care. “Is it an earache?”

His voice is so gentle, so totally and completely absent of resentment or irritation, that it feels like balm on his agonized eardrums. Jeremy nods, still vacillating between relief and self-loathing. 

“I’ll be right back, man,” Michael says, squeezing Jeremy’s knee before getting up from his spot on the sofa and heading up the basement stairs. 

In his absence, Jeremy takes out his hearing aids, zipping them securely in the vinyl pouch that Jenna and Christine decorated for him (there’s a little too much glitter on it for his liking, but he secretly loves the stupid thing). He knows Michael won’t sneak up on him, not right now, but he still can’t relax until he feels the two light taps against his left shoulder. It’s so familiar and so Michael—”if you ever feel three taps, then that’s a ghost and you’re fucked, man” “What about just one tap?” “Then you’re double-fucked”—that he smiles in spite of himself.

Michael sits back down, dropping an armload of provisions into his lap, and positions himself so he’s speaking directly into Jeremy’s better ear. “You better be grateful Nanay and Mama aren’t home. They’d be babying the hell out of you right now.”

Jeremy laughs without thinking. It’s his grating, no-aids laugh, a little too loud and a little too wheezy, but he can’t be embarrassed about it when the sound makes Michael smile like he’s just heard the greatest bass riff in sonic history. “I-I’m so lucky to be stuck with you.”

“You really are, dude. I’m a gift.”

Then Michael is throwing ibuprofen and water at him, and lecturing him about the weather changes and it really isn’t a far cry from what he would have endured if Michael’s moms were home. Jeremy still appreciates the effort and dutifully takes the pills even though they accomplish absolutely nothing when all is said and done. What he’s really grateful for is the obnoxiously bright sugar skull washcloth that typically hangs on a hook over the Mell’s sink—Mama Mell’s greatest treasure—folded into a palm-sized square and bakery-warm from its quick zap in the microwave.

“Thanks,” Jeremy signs, too tired to speak any more. He takes the washcloth and presses it to his ear, closing his eyes in relief. When he opens them again a moment later, Michael is giving him this look that is so cryptic, yet so impossibly familiar, but before he can even wrap his mind around the significance of the look, Michael is reaching for the remote. A few clicks later and the first X-Men movie flickers to life onscreen. Closed captions fill the bottom of the screen, even though Jeremy’s seen this movie and ranted to Michael about it so many times that he has the entirety of it memorized.

Michael catches his eye and signs something completely indecipherable. It’s broken ASL, which he can’t really blame Michael for because translating is absurdly difficult and whoever came up with the signs really didn’t have modern vernacular in mind, but he still manages a sleepy smirk at his best friend’s struggle. 

“Fuck you, you know what I mean,” Michael signs. His “fuck you” is flawless.

Jeremy roughly translates the statement to “bring it in”, an invitation to rest his aching head in Michael’s lap, which itself isn’t an awkward proposition—they’ve gone much more intimate in the past dozen years of friendship—but after the look, Jeremy hesitates. He glances up at Michael, who gives him a smile so soft and genuine that it grants him momentary respite from the thunderous pain in his ear, then makes himself comfortable, tucking his head in Michael’s lap and hooking a hand around his knees.

A hand adjusts the washcloth on his ear. Michael is saying something to him, probably just a well-meaning jab—”well, you certainly made yourself comfortable”—but all Jeremy can feel is the warm, golden reverberations of his voice, the vibrations that are so unmistakably Michael that he feels like he can hear him clearly.

He falls asleep with Michael’s hand resting securely on his shoulder and a tiny glimmer of hope taking form in his heart.

**Author's Note:**

> im @tinylittle-femalechrist on Tumblr, where you can get my au thrown at you 24 hours a day.


End file.
